Oddly enough, just after I wrote that last post, I went and read an article in Science News presenting a posthumous essay by Dr John Wheeler (1911-2008) on the shifts in thought and language imposed on us by the boundaries of quantum theory. In this essay he actually quotes Einstein, who was discomfited by the directions implied by the burgeoning subject:

IF a person, such as a mouse, looks at the universe, does taht change the state of the universe?

Wheeler says Einstein made this remark in the last lecture he ever gave in his life. This gives rise to two thoughts.

One, it is a bit unnerving tothink I just voiced a very similar thought (although I used a person such as an opossum).

Second, the really important part of Einstein's remark has never been highlighted properly. Here we have the leading genius of physics in the whole human race, and he is granting personhood to a mouse.

This is really intriguing. Observation, according to the quantum theorists, influences outcome. But...observation by what? Or should I say, by whom?. EInstein is leading us to the Stuart Little School of Physics. Should we go there?

Wheeler concludes:

"My feeling is that in this show, the territory we've got to get into is so broad, that the only thing to do is to plunge into it and start making tracks, no matter if the track is leading into a swamp. You'll find out."

Quite. Just the other day she was saying, "Where, oh where, is Khandu? He, she, or it hasn't been around in a couple of coons' ages. Is he daid, and if so, was it by a truck on the highway or an irate wife?""

Indeed, Amos. I am ashamed. I hang my head in shame. I am a tortured soul for my inactions toward Mom. I cast a heavy blanket over my entire self and grovel beneath it in penance for my inattention to her. Perhaps I shall purchase a whip and flagellate myself of find some shattered glass to crawl upon.

Perhaps I will just visit her instead!

Looks like y'all have done some renovation since the last time I visited the thread. Looks good...smells rather pleasantly fresh. Hmmm....you must be keeping Spaw and Tweed on a tight leash.

inhuman data is highly unreliable? Doesn't that sort of kick all sorts of science in the ol' head?

Nah--the data is human, even though they are data about inhuman situations. It isn't data until a human has observed it.

This does raise an interesting question about the impact of non-human observation on eigenstates. Can an opossum, for example, unbundle a sheaf of probability states by observing an experiment -- you know, say he snuck in through a roof vent or something. Or does it require human attention to dispose of Schrodinger's cat?

Well, damn! If I'd known the conversation was going to go this way I'd have way-laid the inhuman opossum I slowed down for on the road tonight and brought him home and asked him about this unhuman ken and the K-Mart treasure.

This doesn't have to go on anyone's taxes, does it? The feds don't tax "finders keepers," right?

Look, just because it is beyond human ken does NOT necessarily mean it is within inhuman ken. Just ask any inhuman, some passing raccoon or Stilly's dogs, for example, and you will learn that soon enough. It might be within imaginary playmates ken, which might qualify as inhuman, but it is likely to be highly unreliable data.

Well, at the time, there were K-Marts from Clinton to Dubuque and from Chicago to Wichita Falls. It is unfortunate that particular K-Mart in question was sold several times, to a Jazzercize Clinic, a weights and treadmills gym, a Dianetics Foundation, and finally a warehouse for some Amway chain leader who had a HUGE downline. By that time, everyone had forgotten there even WAS a basement. The building was plowed over and made into a parking lot, but the basement is still here, lost to human ken.

It would do you no good to wander there. The treasures of Solomon's Temple were indeed carried by the plundering Visigoths to Carcasonne. But only the light ones. THe heavier ones fell much later to the Vandals, who had them shipped to North Africa, to ancient Carthage, which in turn was conquered by the mighty army of Belisarius the Byzantine, who took or sent them to his liege lord Justinian in ancient Constantinople. Alas, they were not to find peace yet. An ancient Jewish scholar who had access to justinian's ear told him that ruin had fallen on everyone who had held the treasures--the tablets, the golden menorah, the emeralds--and that the only way to assure Justinian's safety from the same curse was for the treasures to find their way again to the Holy Land. There, they would cease the mystic and catastrophic evil they had wrought on the Romans, the Visigoths, the Vandals.

Justinian paled, and decreed they should be housed not in the ancient Temple of the Crucifixion itself, the Holy Sepulchre, but in the newly-building New Church of Mary.

There, the ancient treasures of the sons of Israel were entombed, to rest in peace until the sacking of the city by the Persians under Alexander's generals. There, the tale as told by the ancient historian Procippus grows dim. It is believed that the Persians carried the them away, perhaps to Persepolis, where they were hiddden from the prying eyes of history until the late 1960's when a new generations of vandals in the form of AMerican juvenile delinquents discovered them while planting a private pot patch in the deserts of Iran.

They made off with them, but one of their history professors passed on Procippus' tale of the fate of those, as told by the ancient Jew, who trifled with the holy treasures. So unnerved were they by this warning that they secreted the treasures in the basement of an unidentified K-Mart somewhere in the Midwest, where they remain to this day.

Well, it was somewhat before his time. Around 1687, in Carcasson I believe it was. A rather scummy sort of dive just off the street of the main gate, but with decent food, good wine and great wenches. You had to take a left turn; if you went right you'd end up by that well all the treasure was supposed to be thrown into.

The only thing that could have been added to improve that occasion, Rapaire, and raise it to the ne plus ultra of its type, would have been if Shane could have also been there. The cops arriving in force is a scenario with which he has much familiarity.

I dunno man. I have, in my thoughtless youth, made fun of those who were offended by stipulated sacrilege, believing they were being too precious for their own good about a bunch of imaginary attributes stuck on a bunch of rusty, dusty icons.

But, in your case, I think sacrilege is definitely an applicable charge. Your braggadocio sounds like something that would be invented around a campfire to see if you could make Big Sergeant Goliath laugh, 'cuz he looked so funny when he really guffawed.

I have to hand it to ya, though, if I have to endure low-class sacriligious jokes, I prefer yours to a few others I have heard. :D Archie Bunker comes to mind.

What we really called him -- "Shithead Shakes" -- would never do in a family-oriented thread like MOAB. I think that name was given to him by Sammy Clemens one night when a bunch of us were sitting around the Tabard in Soutwark, drinking and singing and generally telling lies and acting like we were at Getaway. Jeffy Chaucer about split a gut laughting and even old SS himself thought it was pretty funny.

Of course, we were all pretty drunk at the time, and I remember Big Daddy Bach saying we shouldn't call him that, that it was undignified, and Joe "Greeny" Verdi pulling Big Daddy's wig down over his eyes and pouring a tankard of ale down the front of his pants.

I dunno, Rapaire. This greasy glibness with the first names of the ancient and renowned makers you seem like such a social climber. It has to be said, buddy. A REAL friend of Shakespeare would never call him that, you see what I mean? It's just gauche dude, which is just saying that it is maladroit, too, as gauche is bound to be.

Well, it might be an easy house tonight but here in Idaho the sun is currently shining. But then, you know what such luminaries as Billy Bob Shakespeare and Chucker Dodgson said about the sun and the moon.

Yes, they were hard times, and one had to make do without the formal comforts of modern civilization. But the joys were still there, sometimes more vividly than today. Let us not make a mohel out of a Montaigne.

And a good thing too! Goodness sakes, it was bad enough with the Cardinal's Guards snooping around all over the place, the Inquisition, and other unsavory scoundrels of that sort to contend with at that time.

AH, Rustic, you have been too long away, too far apart; you have forgotten my nature altogether while wandering the wild northern woodlands. Particularly, you may recall that buggery of any sort is not in my quiver whatsoever. ANd although I am generally thought of as a sharp dude, that attribute does not extend to my sphincters; it was a steel blade that left his poor zucchini scarred, and nothing softer.

As for the Hawkster, I cannot say. Perhaps he has been a fudge-packer lo, these many incarnations. Such secrets are not mine to know.

Perhaps while Amos was on public display, he was forcedly given the zucchini from behind, stll held in the hands of the Hawkster, just after eating a meal of beets, explaining the public torment, humiliation and purple ring.